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The Magical Making of Paco Rabanne’s 144-Hour Crystal Dress

The picture of a fashion designer holed away, furiously sketching in remote solitude is over—well, at Paco Rabanne, at least. Creative Director Julien Dossena, who has helmed the house for the past six years, describes his design process as “more of a conversation” between himself and his small but skilled design team. “What is the most fun in my job is to interact with my team, and so I love when they bring back to me other ideas. It’s like a ping-pong game,” Dossena told Vogue Runway the night before his Fall 2019 show.

Nowhere is this artful collaboration more apparent than in the crystal net and chain-link pieces Dossena and company turn out season after season, each a feat of engineering that takes weeks to perfect. This season, the pièce de résistance in that department is Look 24, a crystal-chain dress worn over a floral velvet slip by model Lena Hardt. In the days leading up to the runway, designer Quentin Estève quietly worked on it, pliers in hand. A graduate of École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, Estève learned how to make the brand’s signature metal mesh pieces on the job, becoming the de facto master of the skill inside the atelier.

The making of the dress in question was devised in the atelier through trial and error, relinking and fixing the chain to figure out how to emulate the bias and volume of a 1930s screen siren’s sweeping gown. “It’s really the materials that guide you in the design. You have to master the material to get the design that you want,” said Dossena, noting that the process of building one of these pieces is almost the inverse of a typical cut-and-sew garment. “You have to draw it, then make it real, then test it and experiment with it, because it’s such a conceptual way of cutting and making clothes.”

Estève estimated Hardt’s dress took about 144 hours to produce over the span of two weeks. Six spools of 50m strasse chain were used to make the dress, for a total of 250m of crystal winding around the body. The chain is stapled together with a nickel bind, though each sleeve is made from a single strand folded up and down the arm. According to the design team, the big, evenly spaced panels are the starting point, then the shoulders are built out, then the collar, and finally those single-strand sleeves, with each measurement made exactly to Hardt’s body. (As the fit model this season along with Emmy Rappe, Hardt is the model for every one of the show’s looks, though as she tells Vogue Runway of her glittering dress, “Julien knew this was my favorite.”)

After much work, the dress was transported to the runway venue at the Grand Palais in a white box—too heavy to hang. A team of dressers shimmied Hardt into the frock and then wrapped her in clear cellophane to prevent her, and her crystals, from catching on any of the other looks. On the runway, Hardt emerged mid-show to cement Dossena’s Old Hollywood vision for a new generation, swooshing down the catwalk in crystal-studded tights and kitten heel pumps. Need to have it? Dossena says that this very couture-ish dress will be produced selectively. Place your orders now.